"Black Box: Flight 298," a new thriller from American director Steven Quale about a passenger jet that vanishes mid-flight, has been given a two-star review by critic Sergi Sánchez, who says the film never becomes reckless or cheap enough to shake off the far stranger movies it borrows from.
The film centers on the disappearance of flight 298, traveling from New Orleans to Seattle. Quale directed from a screenplay by Stephen Susco. The cast includes Tom Brittney, Holly White, Betsy-Blue English, Dane Whyte O'Hara and Kaja Chan. It is a United States production from 2026 and runs 85 minutes.
A warning about vanishing flights
According to Sánchez, the film opens with an on-screen warning stating that far more planes lose contact with air traffic controllers than the public realizes, disappearing from radar as though they had never existed. He said that framing echoes the paranoid disappearance thrillers of the 1970s, citing "The Bermuda Triangle" and "The Final Countdown" as touchstones, films that suggested governments, institutions and companies hid inexplicable gaps on Earth to preserve an unsettling appearance of normality.
Sánchez also linked the material to the kind of programming associated with Spanish paranormal broadcasters such as Fernando Jiménez del Oso and, more recently, Iker Jiménez, whose television shows have long explored unexplained disappearances and fringe theories for Spanish audiences.
Found footage gives way to Twilight Zone territory
Sánchez wrote that the film opens with a promising stretch of found-footage material before settling into a structure closer to an episode of "The Twilight Zone." It mixes several strands at once: suspicion that a lethal virus is spreading through the plane's cabin, an elderly passenger who raves about an approaching apocalypse, and colored lights glimpsed among the clouds brushing against the aircraft's wings.
He compared that last image to a gaudier, more carnival-like version of "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," the celebrated episode of Rod Serling's anthology series in which a passenger spots a creature on the wing of his plane during a storm. First broadcast in 1963, the episode remains one of the most referenced hours in American television history.
A promising delirium that loses its nerve
Sánchez said the film is "pas mal," borrowing the French phrase for "not bad," provided the viewer is willing to enjoy the delirium without sabotaging it with logical questions. He added that it was a shame the story's turn toward another science-fiction classic, which he declined to name so as not to spoil it, exposes the film's clumsy visual style. By the end, he wrote, the film feels like one of the filler movies that pad out late-night television schedules.
Quale previously directed the disaster film "San Andreas" and the horror sequel "Final Destination 5," while Susco has written genre films including the American remake of "The Grudge" and "Texas Chainsaw 3D." Sánchez placed "Black Box" in that same lineage of double-feature, neighborhood-cinema fare, describing it as a model of algorithm-driven streaming filmmaking that flattens what should be a showcase of anomalies into images with an overly clean, digitally flat texture.
Best and worst, according to the critic
Sánchez singled out the film's B-movie spirit, seasoned with touches of classic science fiction, as its strongest asset. He named its ugly, algorithm-shaped visual finish, which he compared to a late-night made-for-television movie, as its biggest weakness.
The review awarded "Black Box: Flight 298" two stars.
